From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been trying to get into a mass of material about chapter titles that Matthieu Cassin has kindly sent me.  I hope to blog about some of this over the next few days.  In particular he has located scholarly material which tries to develop some criteria for the authenticity of these things.  This certainly sounds very interesting to me!

But blogging will be light for a bit, for a daft reason.  You see, for the last few weeks I’ve been working out of a hotel.  The hotel has an air-conditioning system which has the kind habit of generating noise at regular intervals, thereby waking me up every four hours during the night.  Somehow it manages to do this, even when turned off by the room switch. 

It’s remarkably difficult, after a while, to concentrate on anything, under the effect of that treatment.  This weekend, indeed, I was almost drunk with tiredness.  Why is it, I wonder, that it is nearly impossible to get a good night’s sleep in any hotel with which I am familiar?  In an type of establishment that exists for no other purpose than to supply sleeping chambers for rent?

So of course I have not got very far with the material in Latin and German. 

The hotel have promised me that tonight the problem will not recur.  So … cross your fingers for me! 

And let’s laugh at the absurdity … for this, friends, is the stuff of life; the things that we spend our lives on, while planning to do something else!

I saw this evening that Mark Goodacre was commenting on the curse that email has become to many scholars.  I’m luckier than most, in that I tend to get a reply eventually.  But I too get a fair amount of email myself; but then I try to handle each email only once, and reply as soon as I read it.  I do not envy him, tho.

But some emails are blessed.  One email this evening cheered me more than I can say.  It showed that God had heard some prayers of mine, made every Monday for many years, and answered them fully.  Very cheered by this.

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Gregory of Nyssa on chapter titles

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In his work De hominis opificio (On the making of man), in the praefatio, Gregory alludes explicitly to a list of chapter titles for the work:

…and for clearness’ sake I think it well to set forth to you the discourse by chapters, that you may be able briefly to know the force of the several arguments of the whole work.[1]

The Greek text of Migne does not print any chapter titles, but the English translators embedded them following this sentence.

The word rendered “chapters” is, of course, kephalaia.  Here at least we see that Gregory is familiar with the idea of a work which may be summarised in this way. 

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  1. [1]PG 44, col. 128B.  English translation from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, which then inserts a translation of the chapter headings which do not appear at this position in the Greek text of Migne.↩

Ancient texts with “indices”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A little while ago a kind correspondent sent me a partial list of ancient works where the manuscripts contain “indices”, or “tables of contents” of the chapters or subjects covered in the book or books. 

I had meant to go and investigate each of these, but my work life is eating all my time at the moment.  However the list is well worth publishing as it is (i.e. before I mislay it!):

Pline l’Ancien, Naturalis Historia livre I. C’est l’exemple le plus célèbre. L’auteur est évidemment Pline.

Valerius Maximus, Facta et dicta memorabilia, édition Briscoe, 2 vols., Teubner Stuttgart et Leipzig, 1998. Je ne sais pas si la récente édition de la Loeb contient les indices. Les éditions plus anciennes ne comportent pas les indices.

Hygin, Fabulae (ed. Schmidt sur Google)

Jérôme, De Viris Inlustribus et Gennadius, De Viris Inlustribus (ed. Richardson et Gebhardt, Texte und untersuchungen 14, 1896). Sur Google.

Florus, Epitomae Libri II, ed. Rossbach, Teubner 1896 (sur Google), ou édition de la collection Loeb.

Cassius Dio, Histoire Romaine, édition Boissevain, tomes 1-3 (sur Archiv.org). Les indices sont conservés pour les livres 37-59 et 80 (à vérifier dans le détail). Ils sont aussi dans l’édition de la Loeb.

Eusèbe de Césarée, Histoire ecclésiastique

Eusèbe de Césarée, Vie de Constantin

John of Nikiu, traduction anglaise Charles, 1916 (site Roger Pearse)

Fréchulf (orthographe très variable) de Lisieux, Historiae (début du 9e siècle), édition Allen, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis CLXIX et CLXIX A, Brepols 2002. N’est évidemment pas sur Internet. L’édition de la Patrologie de Migne (PL 106) ne contient pas les indices. Le meilleur manuscrit, de Saint-Gall, contemporain de l’auteur, contient les indices et se trouve sur Internet. Les indices sont sûrement de l’auteur.

Orose, Adversus paganos. Les éditions de Zangemeister, CSEL 1882 et Teubner 1889 (toutes les deux sur Archiv.org) donnent des indices différents.

Cassiodore, Variae, édition Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica

Cassiodore, Institutiones, édition Sir Roger Mynors

Cassiodore, Historia ecclesiastica, édition Hanslik 1952. Absente sur Internet …

Isidore de Séville, Etymologiae, ed. Lindsay, Oxford, OCT 1911 (2 volumes). A consulter par exemple sur le site de la « Bibliotheca Augustana ».

Grégoire de Tours, Historia Francorum (Monumenta Germaniae Historica)

Frédégaire, Chronique (Monumenta Germaniae Historica). Plusieurs indices.

I hope to investigate each of these, bit by bit.

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“How long is in living memory”, part 2

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A little while ago I asked, “How far back is ‘living memory'”?  I got some interesting answers, but, far more interesting, Tom Schmidt was inspired to dig out some family memories of his own.  His post here deserves to be read by us all. It includes mention of memories of both C. S. Lewis, and the US Civil War.

C. S. Lewis died in 1963.  That’s almost 60 years ago.  Yet it does not seem very long ago, and meeting people who met Lewis is far from improbable.  We have a wealth of information about him.

Yet 60 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus in AD 30 is AD 90.  I think that most of us would feel that by AD 90 the number of living witnesses might be getting thin.  But quite probably we are wrong to think so, simply by analogy with C.S.Lewis.

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Not liking the desert fathers

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Someone tried to be kind to me a couple of weeks ago.  They sent me, anonymously, a copy of “The desert fathers: sayings of the early Christian monks”[1].  I have to say that I can guess who sent it; and that was supposing from my interest in patristics that I might be amenable to something of the kind. 

What is the book?  Well, it’s a very decent modern translation of the Vitae Patrum volume 5, from the Patrologia Latina vol. 73, cols.851-1024.[2]  The same translator has also translated volume 1[3] and been involved with a translation of volume 2[4]

The introduction is interesting — I learned from it, for instance, that the Lausiac History by Palladius is volume 8 of the same work, and is so called because it was dedicated to a certain Lausus the Chamberlain, an imperial official.[5]  A useful note on the text tells us that the sayings were copied, extracted, attributed to different people and places, and so on, and translated from one language to another, compiled, excerpted and so on.  All this is normal for sayings literature such as gnomologia (“wisdom sayings”).

But there is a price to pay for this form of transmission.  A saying must be striking to survive the process.  It must appeal to those who will preserve it, or it will not be transmitted.  It will be rephrased to adjust to different tastes, it will be attributed to different people, often to famous people.  A certain kind of joke in modern English always becomes associated with Winston Churchill; another sort with Oscar Wilde; but the attribution is made casually in order to make the saying more striking, not as the product of some form of careful research!

What this note on the text does not say, then — and surely it should? — is that we cannot know for certain who actually composed any particular saying, and whether it reflects the views of the monks at all.  Many of these may be the product instead of what we might call the “fan base” — people who were not monks, lived in ordinary society, and simply admired what they believed a monk was.

Much of the material consists of sayings that suggest an attempt at humanising some ridiculously ascetic aspirations.  These, possibly, are indeed by the monks, faced with a torrent of people under the craziest misapprehensions as to what to expect; and awaiting massive disappointment and even psychological or physical injury in consequence. 

I’m afraid that I did not find wisdom in these pages.  It is, perhaps, best to dip into such a book rather than try to read it.  But I’m afraid it irritated me.  Possibly having a book wished on me had that effect; but also the fact that one couldn’t know whether the things were anything but fan-fiction annoyed me.  

These sayings of the fathers did not strike me as holy, or inspired.  I’m sorry, but there it is.  

Asceticism, as the translator rightly notes, is not particularly a Christian thing.  It’s something that human beings are drawn to, often as a reaction to a morally corrupt society.  It does not have spiritual value per se. A busy mother bringing up a brood of brattish children will learn more about mortification than any of these.

But Jesus was not an ascetic, and neither were the apostles.  I don’t see the point.

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  1. [1]Translated by Benedicta Ward, Penguin, 2003.↩
  2. [2]Thus the translator, p.xxvi.↩
  3. [3]Harlots of the desert, London:Mowbray, 1987, based on PL 73 cols 651-71↩
  4. [4]The lives of the desert fathers, translated by Norman Russell, London:Mowbray, 1981, based on PL 73, cols. 707-39.↩
  5. [5]p.xxix.↩

Automated microfilm readers to convert microfilms to digital form?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In Oracle Magazine this month, there is an interesting article about a genealogical firm who are systematically converting microfilmed records into digital format.

At one archival site, FamilySearch has been storing images of historic documents on microfilm since the 1930s and has amassed 3.5 million rolls of film containing 4 billion records.

“Microfilm is a very stable medium, but it is not very accessible,” says Randy Stokes, group architect for engineering services, storage infrastructure, at FamilySearch. “We knew that if we wanted to make it easier for people to do research and find their ancestors, we would have to put this information into digital form.”

It’s a huge job. Approximately 25 automated scanners are used to scan the microfilm to digital images. Additionally, new photographic images are continually coming in from 185 digital cameras in the field. These operations yield terabytes of new image data each day. The original lossless images are saved as JPEG 2000 images for long-term storage … One copy is written to an in-house preservation system and another to an offsite archival location.

…“Between the scanners and the cameras, we amass 10 to 12 terabytes of new image data each day.”

Manuscript images also exist in microfilm in great quantities.  I don’t know which brand of machines are used here — a Google search reveals several types — but clearly it is both practical and effective.

 

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve had an email with some material extracted from Matthieu Cassin’s thesis about Gregory of Nyssa, with the pages discussing the chapter titles in the manuscripts.  I’ve not had a chance to read it yet, but it looks fascinating.  Dr Cassin has done some real work here, and I will discuss it further.

Also I found myself thinking about Mithras today.  Readers will remember that between 2009 and the end of 2010 I revised the Wikipedia Mithras article, to produce something reliable, only to have the work hijacked by a troll.  The troll deleted all references to me — the author of most of it! — and changed it to “prove” that Mithras preceded Jesus, etc; and he has sat on it, dog-in-the-manger, ever since.  But in a way he did me a favour, since I was beginning to contribute far too much time to Wikipedia.

But the reason that I dedicated so much time to looking up and verifying and quoting so much material about Mithras was to dispose of the many myths that circulate online.  That reason is still valid, and it seems to me that it would be sensible to write a few pages about Mithras, using secondary sources of a reliable kind, in order to provide a useful resource to those who need it. 

The obvious thing to do would be to start with the last reliable version — nothing the troll did was of any value –, and remove whichever bits I have not written or validated myself, and then build on that.  

There would be a main page, consisting of short sections, each with a link to a page on that specific subject.  Each sentence in the short sections would be referenced; probably to a reference on the specific page, rather than on the main page.

It would be important to have a professional look to the pages.  I’m not sure how best to achieve that, short of hiring someone (which, of course, is an option).  Some nice graphics would be nice, if I knew a decent graphics designer who could draw…

Ideally the pages would be editable online; but at the moment I couldn’t spare the time for online editing anyway.  I don’t really want to install MediaWiki, so we may have to sacrifice that, and just fall back on some kind of HTML editing.

The object, as always, would be to allow a reader to access the subject, not to push a narrative or my opinions (indeed I have none on Mithras, except that I don’t want to see disinformation circulating).

As part of this, my policy is always to have references that quote the source in extenso, and to link to the online text where possible.  In this way the reader can verify for himself whether or not the reference is fair or accurate.  I did this, after I discovered that most of the references in the Wikipedia Mithras article, before I worked on it, were in fact bogus.  Quote and link makes that problem disappear, and I would continue it.

Naturally I would want to link closely to primary materials.  It would be right to do something about inscriptions and images, if one could.

A page on Mithra, the Persian deity whose name was probably borrowed by the unknown founder of the Mithras cult, would probably be useful.

A guestbook in which comments and feedback could be added would probably be useful also.

Ah, but when will I get the *time*!!!!

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Chapter divisions in Gregory of Nyssa’s “Contra Eunomium”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is a paper on the web by Matthieu Cassin, discussing the context of the three books of the Contra Eunomium of Gregory of Nyssa.[1]  In the middle of it (p.112) he discussed the divisions in the text, as it has been transmitted.  It’s fascinating stuff.

Besides the division of Book III, the different manuscripts present a list of titles for the different chapters (κεφάλαια). A large number of manuscripts indicate the chapters of Book I in the margins, proposing converging positions for them.(16) Furthermore, it is acknowledged that the chapters of Book I are by Gregory himself,(17) and I have shown that their position goes back at least to the sixth century. If this is accurate, it would be a very valuable testimony to the way Gregory understood his own text. However, the chapters of the other books are obviously not by the same hand.

(16) Matthieu Cassin, L’écriture de la polémique à la fin du IVe siècle: Grégoire de Nysse, Contre Eunome III (Thèse de doctorat, Université Paris IV – Sorbonne, 2009), vol. I, 135–7.
(17) See J. A. Röder, Gregor von Nyssa, Contra Eunomium I, 1–146, eingeleitet, übersetzt und kommentiert (Patrologia 2; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993), 73–4.

This is interesting, and I wish I could see the references!  For if so, this is evidence of 4th century authorial chapter titles.  The thesis does not seem to be online; while no-one on earth could access the Röder volume unless they live near a research library.

I will write to Dr Cassin and see if I can get a peek at his pages 135-7!

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  1. [1]Matthieu Cassin«Text and context : the importance of scholarly reading. Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium», dans S. Douglas, M. Ludlow (éd.), Reading the Church Fathers, Londres, 2011, p. 109-131 et 161-165.↩

A curious article opposing open-access to the products of state-funded research

Posted on by Roger Pearse

AWOL has drawn my attention to a rather curious article by the president of the Archaeological Institute of America, Elizabeth Bartman.

The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2012 was introduced in both houses of Congress on February 9 of this year.

The legislation would require that publishers of academic and scholarly journals provide the government with final peer-reviewed and edited manuscripts, and, six months after their publication, those manuscripts would be made available to the public, on the Internet, for no charge. The House bill states, “The Federal Government funds basic and applied research with the expectation that new ideas and discoveries that result from the research, if shared and effectively disseminated, will advance science and improve the lives and welfare of people of the United States and around the world.”

Quite properly too.  Who but a vested interest could argue that those who pay should be able to see the fruits of what they pay for?  Well…

We at the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), along with our colleagues at the American Anthropological Association and other learned societies, have taken a stand against open access. Here at the AIA, we particularly object to having such a scheme imposed on us from the outside …

Huh?  Why on earth?

Here at the AIA, we particularly object to having such a scheme imposed on us from the outside when, in fact, during the AIA’s more than 130-year history, we have energetically supported the broad dissemination of knowledge, and do so through our extensive program of events and lectures for the general public and through our publications.

Emphasis mine.  This woman believes that the public must pay for the research, but is NOT entitled to see the research.  Instead they should be grateful to be allowed to attend the occasional public lecture — if they live anywhere nearby — and to know that the publications exist, even if they can’t ever see them.  Wow.  That’s pretty obscurantist.

While it may be true that the government finances research, it does not fund the arduous peer-review process that lies at the heart of journal and scholarly publication, nor the considerable effort beyond that step that goes into preparing articles for publication. Those efforts are not without cost. When an archaeologist publishes his or her work, the final product has typically been significantly improved by the contributions of other professionals such as peer reviewers, editors, copywriters, photo editors, and designers. This is the context in which the work should appear. (Almost all scholarly books and many articles lead off with a lengthy list that acknowledges these individuals.)

What?  The public is to be denied access, because someone has to pay typesetters so that it can appear in nice printed form?!  Talk about cart before horse!  As for reviewers … erm, just how do reviewers get paid now?  By the taxpayer, of course, who funds every element of their life-style bar one or two.

But of course Mrs Bartman has published this article on the web.  We might ask, if we are cynical enough, how she was able to afford to place her article on the web?  After all, are there not “the contributions of other professionals such as peer reviewers, editors, copywriters, photo editors, and designers”? 

There is a polite response here. 

My own response, as a member of  the tax-paying public, is to suggest that AIA find another president.  Open access is morally right.  Obstructing it is morally wrong, and, for someone who lives off the public, disgustingly wrong.  Mrs Bartman needs to be removed, for the sake of the AIA itself.

UPDATE: Quite by coincidence I saw this cartoon at Trevin Wax.  For some reason it seemed relevant:

Ever wonder why textbooks are so expensive? Me too. (HT)

UPDATE: Another dissection of the same article here.

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Images of 5th century letter titles in Pliny the Younger

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Lowe and Rand publication[1] of the Morgan fragment of the 5th century Saint-Victor manuscript of the letters of Pliny the Younger has, by great good fortune, images of the transition between books 2 and 3.  These include a contents list for book 3, consisting of the recipients, followed by the opening words.

Let’s have a look.  Note that you can click on each image for a larger view.

Here’s the end of the first folio of the Morgan fragment — folio 48r, as it was, of the whole manuscript, as the folio number written in a 15th century Italian hand indicates.

So nothing special: “Exp(licit) liber II | Inc(ipit) Lib(er) III.” — “Book 2 ends | Book 3 begins”, plus the usual “feliciter”.  Over the page we find on the verso this:


The lines are alternate black and red ink.  (I do apologise for the wretched quality).  And the next page is similar (you can see the folio number, 49, top right):

This ends with a line of marks, and then on the verso the text begins:

“C.Plinius Calusio Suo Salutem. Nescio nullum …”  Note how the words of the text are not separated in this 5th century manuscript, and the the first two words of the text are as in the table of contents.  And also notice … how the full name of the recipient, Calusius Rufus, is NOT given in the title in the text, which simply says “C. Pliny to his (dear) Calusius, greeting”.

Likewise the beginning of the next letter is also in the Morgan fragment, on folio 61:

Ignore the 15th century scribblings at the top, and note the folio number.  Here it reads “C. Plinius Maximo suo salutem.”  This is the next addressee; Vibius Maximus, as we learn from the index and nowhere else.

The same is true of the next three letters, also present in these few folios, which I will spare you here.  The index of addressees gives two names in every case; the actual superscriptio to the letter gives one.

The presence of extra information in the titles means that these cannot be scribal work; they must come down from Pliny himself, unless we propose to imagine some intermediate person locating this information and adding it, which seems unlikely and unnecessary.

The Lowe and Rand publication, bless  them, also gives the chapter titles in the only other manuscript that has them.  Here they are:

Note that the addressee of the first letter is as it is in the 5th century ms., but the first two words have been moved to the right, to save space.

The titles continue onto the next folio, and then, once again, the superscription of the letter only has the one name, “Calusius”.

Curiously yesterday I discovered a 15th century manuscript of Pliny at the Bibliotheque Nationale site in Paris, shelfmark Ms. Latin 8557.  Let’s have a look at the same point in that:

 There are no titles in this, and the first letter simply refers to “Calusius”.

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  1. [1]E.A. Lowe and E.K. Rand, A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger: A Study of Six Leaves of an Uncial Manuscript Preserved in the Pierpont Morgan Library New York, Washington (1922).  Online here.↩